In 1943, Leo Kanner, a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, published the first clinical description of 11 children with autism.

In this initial description of ‘infantile autismʼ, which went on to become a classic in the field of clinical psychiatry, Kanner described a distinct syndrome instead of previous depictions of such children as feeble-minded, retarded, moronic, idiotic or schizoid. In the words of his contemporary Erwin Schrödinger, Kanner “thought what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”

Kanner borrowed the term ‘autismʼ from Eugene Bleuler, who had coined it to describe the inward, self-absorbed aspects of schizophrenia in adults. But Kanner did not consider infantile autism an early form or prodrome of schizophrenia. The clinical signs were not identical and, unlike schizophrenia, Kannerʼs patients seemed to have autism from birth